My system consists of a Dell Precision T5500 with 2 Xeon processors, 24GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Geforce 760 graphics card. I recently decided to replace my hard drive with 2 identical 512GB SSD drives running as a Level 0 striped RAID. I have been encountering major problems getting Ubuntu to install on my system. I have been trying to install Ubuntu with LUKS full-disk encryption and LVM. Basically, every single time I run the installation, near the end I get an error which basically says that the installer can't install grub to /dev/sda, and a message that says "This is a fatal error". I get a drop-down menu that wants me to choose where to put the MBR, but NONE of the options work.
I have tried various recent versions of Ubuntu (18.04, 18.10, Ubuntu proper, Ubuntu Mate), and even tried the most recent version of Debian, all with the same results. To try to pin down the problem, I stripped by system down to just the core hardware -- just the graphics card and the two hard drives plugged into SATA0 and SATA1. I am setting up the RAID volume with the RAID setup utility built-into the BIOS. The utility is very simple to use.
BTW, to prove that there is NOTHING wrong with me or my hardware, and I am doing NOTHING wrong, Fedora 30 with full-disk encryption installs totally fine with no problems whatsoever, on the very same hardware.
I did find a VERY annoying work-around. I disconnected my RAID drives, and plugged a small (120GB) drive into SATA0. I installed Ubuntu on the small drive (without encryption). Then I connected my RAID drives to SATA1 and SATA2, set up the RAID volume, and install Ubuntu with LUKS and LVM to the RAID volume. At the end, the installer puts the MBR on the small drive. This is FAR from ideal, because if I ever boot into the Ubuntu install on the small drive and either run "update-grub" or update the OS (which will basically do the equivalent of an "update-grub" at the end), I will likely lose EVERYTHING. This is because the Ubuntu installation on the small drive will fail to see the installation on the RAID volume (since there is no MBR on the RAID volume), and I will lose the ability to boot into the RAID volume.
I plan to edit or add to this message soon with pictures of what is going on.
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